Charles Morris was a performing magician in his youth -- Max Fisch brought this to my attention in 1983 when I was researching Morris's papers at the Peirce project. Morris has an elaborate album with his ad's and reports of his performances, etc. As his miserable editing of Mead's ms's show, he vastly overrated his abilities so magicians aren't necessarily "smarter" than their audience apart from what they have read or learned from others of tricks.
Harold L. Orbach Sent from my iPhone On Apr 11, 2014, at 1:45 PM, "Benjamin Udell" <bud...@nyc.rr.com<mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote: Dear John, list, Thank you, John. That's an interesting article, I'm glad I read it. I'm reminded of a book about Tausk and Freud that I read when I was young; it was called _Talent and Genius_, and the author argued that talent is the ability to recognize genius. It would be interesting if Dunning tried to find people who are able to recognize people smarter than themselves - I mean smarter at tasks in which all of them are engaged, not just smarter-sounding through big words - and look for what such smartness-recognizing people, if he can find them, have in common. Ford Madox Ford somewhere wrote that the reason that it is difficult to recognize excellent contemporary literature (i.e., literary art) is that one's mind is filled with fads and fashions that one has not recognized as mere fads and fashions yet. He said that literature is anything still 'readable' after 50 or 100 years. It's been a long time since I read it but, by 'readable', I think he meant not only _intelligible_ but _esthetically tolerable_. Of course he may have had a higher standard of such readability than many of us have. Anyway, the article makes enough sense that I think I need to change my claim. If _everybody_ is inclined to self-overestimation in intelligence (cf. Peirce's remark that everybody thinks himself (or herself) to know enough about logic), then does anything remain of my claim about a temptation biggest for the intelligent? Magicians, when not performing for one another or for aficionados, perform for audiences that usually lack special expertise about magic tricks. Such an audience is outside its own area of knowledgeability and consists of (A) those who don't know that they're out of their depth, or don't realize just _how_ out of their depth they are, and (B) those who know (or at least believe) that they're out of their depth. Magicians have noticed, according to a magician whom I used to know quite well, that Set A includes people who seem smart, seem to regard themselves as smart, and try (sometimes desperately) to figure the trick out, while set B includes the other people, who don't try to figure the trick out and are not much impressed because, "well, you did it somehow." Thus a magician is in the somewhat paradoxical position of regarding some people as smart enough to be fooled or feel bewildered (either way, it's when they get caught up in trying analyze and explain the trick), and others as too stupid to be fooled or feel bewildered or, to put it another way, too stupid to be as impressed as the magician would like! To be sure, they're smart in a practical way. By 'fooled', I mean, not by the fooled one's known unknowns but by the fooled one's unknown unknowns. When I think of that, I think of certain psychologists and physicists who have been fooled by certain prestidigitators who have claimed paranormal abilities - no names please. Everybody who cares about that perennial debate knows where to go for names and arguments from either side. It is not difficult in theoretical research to get beyond one's own 'turf' - for example an excellent biologist is not necessarily an excellent statistician, and vice versa, and the more interdisciplinary the research, the more it can become an issue. More generally, most of us have gotten off of familiar turf in various ways at one time or another, and, _bolstered by the confidence and, for some of us, the rewards, honors, etc., that we have gained in dealing with the more familiar_, have not taken sufficient account of where we are now, and have hardly known what hit us. So, I retract what I said about the method of status as being, among inquirial methods of authority, "the biggest temptation of the intelligent" and replace it with the idea that the method of status, and of granting oneself too high a status of knowledgeability, is the biggest temptation among the aforesaid methods tempting those trying for a theoretical or hypothetical understanding that goes beyond the familiar - but on the other hand, those seriously trying for a theoretical or hypothetical understanding of unfamiliar things are likelier to be smart and to rate themselves as even smarter (as most people overrate themselves in intelligence, if Dunning's samples are fairly representative). Best, Ben On 4/10/2014 4:05 PM, John Collier wrote: Dear Ben, List, Ben, I agree with most of what you say, but the last part on self-authority goes somewhat against current research. For those interested more, I include a link to a short news item. Apparently the smartest among us are better at both self-evaluation and self-criticism, but the less bright don't have this capacity. At 09:11 PM 2014-04-09, Benjamin Udell wrote: Among the methods of authority, perhaps the biggest temptation in discovery research is the method of status, especially when it is a method of _self _-deception, such that one grants oneself a status of greater knowledgeability, etc., than one fairly has; it's a temptation of the intelligent; magicians find it easier to bewilder or beguile 'smart' people than to do so with 'stupid' people, by whom magicians mean, the people who are unimpressed and chuckle, "well, you did it somehow" (but those people are obviously smart enough in another way). As Feynman said, the person whom it is easiest for one to fool is oneself. Peirce focuses, near the end of "Fixation," on the closing of one's eyes or ears to the information or evidence that might bring one the truth particularly when one should know better. This closing of one's perception, in sometimes less guilty ways, plays a particularly vulnerable role in the method of tenacity because it is there unprotected by folds of authority or of aprioristic emulation of some fermented paradigm; instead there is to keep practicing and repeating one's initial opinion, it seems a bit like the gambler's fallacy, boosted sometimes by some initial luck. Well, practice and repetition of something that has shown _some _ success is the core practical-learning method, not inevitably infallibilistic, of artisans and more generally practitioners productive and otherwise; to which method they add the appreciational method of devotees (including the religious) - identification (appreciation) and imitation (emulation) and, these days, the methods of reflective disciplines as well (sciences, fine arts, etc.). What I'm getting at is that some infallibilistic methods of inquiry can be seen as misapplications, or at least as echoes, of methods that have some validity outside of inquiry as the struggle to settle opinion, and thus have validity in applications in inquiry (e.g., one needs to keep _in practice _ in doing math, etc.), as long as those applications are not confused with inquiry itself. Anyway, one's barring of one's own way to truth inhabits the core of all infallibilistic inquiry. Perhaps one can reduce all logical sins to this, as long as one remembers the difference between logical sin and other logical errors, errors sometimes imposed on one. Some excerpts http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/pure-genius/qa-why-40-of-us-think-were-in-the-top-5/?tag=nl.e660&s_cid=e660&ttag=e660&ftag=TRE4eb29b5 Psychologist David Dunning explains that not only are we terrible at seeing how stupid we are, but we're also too dumb to recognize genius right in front of us. "One of my favorite examples is a study of the engineering departments of software firms in the Bay Area in California. Researchers asked individual engineers how good they were. In Company A 32% of the engineers said they were in the top 5% of skill and quality of work in the company. That seemed outrageous until you go to Company B, where 42% said they were in the top 5%. So much for being lonely at the top. Everybody tends to think that they are at the top much more than they really are." "People do what they can conceive of, but sometimes there are better solutions, or considerations and risks they never knew were out there. They don't take a solution they don't know about. If there is a risk they do not know about, they don't prepare for it. There are any number of unknown unknowns that we are dealing with whenever we face a challenge in life." "Your recent work surrounds genius. Specifically the fact that we cannot recognize a genius even when they are right in front of us? Our past research was about poor performers and how they did not have the skills to recognize their shortcomings. Well, ultimately, we found out that that is true for everybody. It's a problem we all have. We might recognize poor performers because we outperform them. The problem is we do not see mistakes we are making. But people who are more competent than us, they can certainly see our mistakes. Here is the twist: For really top performers we cannot recognize just how superior their responses, or their strategy is, or their thinking is. We cannot recognize the best among us, because we simply do not have the competency to be able to recognize how competent those people are." He also has some suggestions for what to do when one finds oneself in a lop-sided situation, as well as how to get outide of the the problem of self-evaluation. John ________________________________ Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za<mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za> Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 Http://web.ncf.ca/collier <http://web.ncf.ca/collier> ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu<mailto:l...@list.iupui.edu> with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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